Humans use language to accomplish tasks in their environment - establishing relationships, making deals, coaxing others, etc. By contrast, all neural language m

Humans use language to accomplish tasks in their environment - establishing relationships, making deals, coaxing others, etc. By contrast, all neural language models do is predict the next word as a function of the previous word. So far, these language models have nothing at all to do with language learning. They're only valuable insofar as they advance downstream engineering tasks like machine translation.